A Dictator's Speech
A database of 1,700+ speeches by Nicaragua's President and Vice-President (2015–2023), compiled to enable research on political discourse and authoritarian rhetoric.
What it’s about
A database of over 1,700 speeches delivered by Nicaragua’s President and Vice-President, compiled from official transcripts published in pro-government media. The collection spans speeches given by the presidential couple between September 2015 and December 2023. The goal is to make this material accessible for future research on political discourse and authoritarian rhetoric in Nicaragua — data that would otherwise be scattered across individual media outlets and hard to analyze systematically.
Stack
- Language: Python, for scraping, cleaning, and analysis
- Delivery: a dashboard built to preview the data, run topic modeling, and surface sentiment analysis
How it was built
Speeches were sourced from official transcripts as published in pro-government outlets, then compiled and cleaned into a structured dataset spanning eight years of public addresses. On top of the raw text, the project layers two lightweight analytical passes: a basic topic modeling exercise to surface recurring themes across the corpus, and a simple sentiment analysis to track tone over time. Both are presented on the companion website, alongside a data preview so researchers can inspect the dataset before downloading it.
The full dataset can be downloaded either from the website or directly from the GitHub repository, where the Python code behind the project is also publicly available.
